The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.

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Friday, November 30, 2007

Everyone calls it vajayjaynow, you know, down there.I read this in the New York Times.Oprah says it.Steinem has weighed inhoping it contains the nervy bitsthe real V-word ignores.Me, I love the childhood nametaught by Mom and Mimi:Whatsa-doodle-dandy!Big happy wordthat rhymes with candy.

Donna Hilbert’s latest poetry collection is Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems, Pearl Editions 2004. Ms. Hilbert appears in and her poetry is the text of the short film, “Grief Becomes Me,” the first in a trilogy of her poems to be included in a documentary on her work and life by award-winning filmmaker Christine Fugate. She lives in Long Beach , California, where she is working on a play and conducting a master class in poetry.

If, at the beginning of the 21st century, Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on the spinning wheel—a cursed act that anesthetized an entire kingdom—there would be no prince to climb the thorny walls and plant a kiss. Contemporary male royalty gets too horny planning the next invasion, entering (or exiting) rehab or trolling bars (or executive offices) searching for the perfect mouth to kiss their cocks goodnight. No one, it seems, wants a relationship anymore. A fetishistic furor might be whipped up if the kingdom’s itinerant administration—set up at the time of the prick in faraway New York City’s Gramercy Park—put the Beauty’s slumbering figure on the Internet, but her body would need to be stripped—creamy flesh exposed to the masses of insensitive gawkers who only hoped to catch a glimpse of the numbed out princess awakening to an autoerotic act. There would be no conversation of her award-winning spinning skill. Her kindness to orphaned children in land-mined countries would be lost amidst the stream of anesthetized techno-bloggers who only noticed how one breast was spread out like margarine melting in the hot summer sun. Their blogs would espouse theories as to the scar near her pubis: was it from a secret botched abortion or her father’s tight fist—the rumor being that the former WWF wrestling champion was never able to keep his hands to himself? Mainly though, enthusiasm would wane once Snow White’s dilemma was broadcast—that Wicked Queen breaking down on Oprah’s couch, The mirror made me do it, the mirror made me do it! Or the stepsisters’ revealing to Larry King how Cinderella cheated and stole their rightful place to the crown: She didn’t go into rehab for nothing, they’d sniff. Once the child abuse charges against the Old Woman in the Shoe appeared on every major news channel including the Fox News Network all eyes would turn towards the kids’ anguished faces. The youngest, fathered by the Old Woman’s fifth or perhaps sixth paramour, would blubber, Of course she’s got no husband, who would want to live with her? Then there would be the harrowing tale of Hansel and Gretel—cannibalism in modern times. Oh my! Anderson Cooper would get the scoop on that pair escaping with their lives, minus a few fingers and toes. Perhaps if the fairy witch who cursed Sleeping Beauty shot a video, her hair sheathed in a white turban and dressed in a navy suit, white button-down shirt, and red power tie, where she threatened to do it again, people might fathom the predicament of an anesthetized town lost to a familial curse, but then again, they’d probably rather view the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where the deposed Emperor would hawk his memoir, Finding Fabric. C’mon, Jon would say to the Emperor, You’re telling me you took so many pills you had no idea you were walking around so that your boys were hanging for anyone to see? It’s a little hard to believe, if you know what I mean. The Emperor would smile sheepishly, Yes, Jon, exactly. It was harrowing once I grasped that everyone was witness to my pound of flesh.

Nancy Caronia’s work has previously appeared in Coloring Book (2003 Rattlecat Press), Don't Tell Mama! The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing, and Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (Feminist Press). She writes the monthly Lesson Plans column for Government Video magazine.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Christopher Woods is the author of a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a collection of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His play, Moonbirds, about doomed census-takers at work in an uninhabited desert country, received its New York City premiere at Personal Space Theatrics. He lives in Houston and in Chappell Hill , Texas .

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Make the smallest distinction…And heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

--The Faith Mind Sutra

Two mothers in Jerusalem: one Jewish, Israeli, one Muslim, Palestinian.

The daughter of one, a suicide bomber.

The daughter of the other, victim of her bomb.

Rachel and Ayat. Both seventeen. Same dark long hair, large dark eyes,same color skin, same height.

They didn’t know whose body parts belonged to whose body.

For four years since the bombing, Rachel’s mother seeks to meet themother of Ayat,

to convince her to condemn the act of her daughter, to urge “her people”to turn against violence.

She needs her daughter to have died for something.

For four years the mothers are kept apart: impassable checkpoints, fearof the camp’s dark streets.

Finally they meet, each in front of a camera crew.

They speak to each other’s faces on a tv screen, the covered mother andthe uncovered, each one with a speech

put together over a lifetime:

Say it, that your daughter did wrong. Say you want peace.When I have a home, when I have my land back, when the occupationis over.

back and forth:

When you stop, I’ll stop.No, you stop first.Terrorist.Occupier.My land.

No, my land.

The grooves of language.

Rachel was always at my side. She helped me, always.Ayat was distinguished. She loved her studies. I would not have let her,I would have held her back if I knew. But this is what she chose.

Each side given full voice. Even handed. No tanks, no bombs, no stones.

This is not Israel. This is my country.This is not your country. Just say your daughter is wrong.Just say you’ve taken my country. Just live in a camp as I do.Just say peace comes first.This is bedrock, ground--two pairs of dark eyes grief worn.

I listen until there is no right or wrong.

Sondra Zeidenstein's poems have been published in magazines, journals and anthologies, and in a chapbook collection entitled Late Afternoon Woman. A Detail in that Story is her first book; Resistance is her second. She is editor of several anthologies including A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence and Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children, and publisher of Chicory Blue Press, a small literary press, now twenty years old, that focuses on strong writing by older women.

In the Judean wilderness, Israeli farmers—growers of grapes, dates—invite Arab shepherdsthere to graze their sheep.

--Item, unreported by any press

In the Judean Desertthere are leopards.

One, in fact, attendeda wedding. He sat in a tree

during the whole affair.No one knew he was there.

B.E. Kahn, native Philadelphian, now lives in Wynnewood, Pa. Her poems have appeared in Harrisburg Review, CQ, California Quarterly, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, Earth’s Daughters, Bridges, A Jewish Feminist Journal and in the June/July 2007 online Tupelo Press Poetry Project as well as other publications. Her awards include First Prize for Poetry at the Philadelphia Writers Conference, a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Grant and a Pew Grant for Studies in the Humanities.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

little girls don't wear laceor play with dolls.They are taken,taken by the janjaweed,taken with the womenwith the camelswith the cows.Some return;some are never seen again.

In Darfurin a lawless landthe mango tree fallscrops burncarcasses float in the wellswadis are bare, broken by bombs.

In Darfuracross a scorched earthSatan rides a stallion, and thewhite bird does not come in peace.

Yolanda Coulaz is a poet, photographer, editor and founder of Purple Sage Press. Her poetry has won a number of awards and has been widely published. Her signature poem "Cool, Cotton Comfort" won first place in the Mattia Family 8th International Poetry Competition. Coulaz has published an anthology of animal poems For Loving Precious Beast to help benefit Loving Touch Animal Rescue. Her first book of poetry Spirits and Oxygen was released in 2003 and is currently being use in an advanced course in poetry at SUNY Stony Brook.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Death of the Frog Prince (2004) and Heartland (2007), both from FootHills Publishing, and Strangers & Angels, forthcoming from Scintillating Publications. He was recently nominated for the second time for a Pushcart Prize.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Postmodernist:I am the very model of postmodernism’s ritualsMy world is made of language reinforced by strong habituals --There’s nothing really out there, and there’s no one who exists for me –And any people hearing this are other solipsists for me.The world is in my head, I don’t believe in physicality;I brilliantly create it all with magical reality,Rejecting all experience with mystical depravity –Ignoring Alan Sokal’s twenty-storey test of gravity.

Postmodernist:It used to be that science was the tool for every liberalTo use to show that kings and priests were selling mystic gibberal,But now we want our new-age crystal-gazing fuddy-duddyingNot lectures, labs, experiments, or -- goddess save us! -- studying.

Postmodernist:Postmodern art is anything an artist may assert it is;It isn’t hard to see what kind of formless blowhard blurt it is.Where nothing’s good or bad there’s only infinite variety:Your deepest held belief is someone else’s impropriety.And even that’s not really real, your brain is just achieving itThrough language, fear, and habit, and believing in believing it --Which means respect the rules of which each local god has sent a list:You cannot be postmodern if you’re not a fundamentalist.

Chic Chorus:You cannot be postmodern if you’re not a fundamentalist.You cannot be postmodern if you’re not a fundamentalist.You cannot be postmodern if you’re not a fundamentalist.

Postmodernist:We don’t distinguish good from bad – we can’t be preferentialist --And sneer at beauty, justice, truth, and balance as essentialist.Reality is all made up, and truth’s a triviality,And science isn’t anything but jumped-up mysticality.

Chic Chorus:Reality is all made up, and truth’s a triviality,And science isn’t anything but jumped-up mysticality.

Postmodernist:When I can claim there’s no there there, it isn’t verifiable –Which means that any claim that I put forward’s undeniable;When I can claim that making claims is meaningless is meaningless --As if to try to sanitize a hospital by cleaning less;When all I need to do is spout some double talk for victoryBy claiming contradiction is itself a contradictory,When all that science claims is that it’s merely hypotheticalThen heresy is always truth and every truth heretical!

Chic Chorus:Then heresy is always truth and every truth heretical!Then heresy is always truth and every truth heretical!Then heresy is always truth and every truth heretical!

Postmodernist:And so therefore we’ve cleared away the sciences’ dementedness,And we are left to celebrate our contentless contentedness:Our world is made of language reinforced by strong habituals --We are the very models of postmodernism’s rituals.

Chic Chorus:Our world is made of language reinforced by strong habituals --We are the very models of postmodernism’s rituals.

Friday, November 23, 2007

When candidates look for a victim to pilloryDonkey or elephant—they all point at HillaryGiuliani says she’s slippery and pushyEdwards says she’s a closet BushieRomney says she’s keen on abortionObama says her ego’s out of proportionThey all say her positions are inconsistentAnd complain that she seems attack-resistantThey resent the white-haired guy who’s coaching herAnd find endless reasons for reproaching her.They all hotly deny it’s a matter of genderSo no gentleman need rise to defend herThough she may not deserve to be the winnerIn the mix she’s hardly the greatest sinner.Like all the others she has flagrant faultsBut she alone is subject to such assaults.What drives them berserk is the thought of a femaleWith POTUS.gov the address on her email.

Anne G. Davies is a fund-raising writer by profession and a writer and versifier by avocation. Her work has been published in local and regional papers. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Monday, November 19, 2007

It's almost timeLast touches to the maskA rose between the teethto neutralizethe dubious fragrance of wordsAngelsinvisibleare already clutchingthe puppet's hairblowing a suffused aura of truththrough their trumpets

On the right shoulderor the left--to perch in the middleis nearly impossibleThe head is claimedby angels--On a shoulder thena parrotat its postready to repeatinto the puppet's earthe latest trigger wordthe punch in a sound biteAh, not to forgetSmiles smiles smilesThey must be perfect-- A little bit of sugar...You know!

The audience is a spoiled catIt likes to be scratchedbehind the earsto have its belly rubbedbut her whiskers still quiverat the sight of a chaseat the irresistible lure of goreStill it won't lift a pawto de-bone its own preyIt prefers it served in a cupas a mousse

If you can make it purrit is hypnotizedready for the real showThe one where the old charlatanwith the unctuous voiceoffers his latest love potion

Marcelle Kasprowicz was born in Niort, France. She received an M.A. from UT at Austin. She is an Austin resident. She writes in English and French and also translates her French poems in English. In 2001 she was awarded first prize for her poem "House of Bones" in the Austin International Poetry Festival Anthology. She had her poems published in Ascent Aspiration, Farfelu, The Texas Poetry Calendar, Languageandculture.net (on line). She is the author of Organza Skies, a book of poems about the Davis Mountains of West Texas, published in 2005.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

In a quiet moment among the vehiclesparked outside the Safeway storea man approaches with his whispered pleafor change. Just released from Maranahe says and they dropped me at Thirty-fifthand Van Buren. It’s a hundred degree day.Got family in Colorado. He’s been in prisonfor years, and it hardly matters to himwhat time the bus to Denver leaves. He can wait,but not walk in this heat. They left mewithout money or water, can you spare . . . ?We stand between those SUVswith too much power for the city, the onesthat shine and brag about their ownerswhile waiting for them to finishshopping. Buying a new car means choicesbetween making an impression with sizeor investing in modesty, paying more to saveon gas later or paying more not to care.I could call my brother to wire me somethingsays the man, whose incarceration began beforeanyone spoke much about fuel efficiency.He swallows just to feel the moisture in his throat.For a dollar and a quarter you can take the busto the station I tell him and present the two crumpled billsI have left. He takes them and thanks mebefore I remind him that seventy-five centswon’t buy a bottle of water anymore.He’s free now, which means choices.

David Chorlton lives in Phoenix, writes and paints and keeps track of local wildlife. His newest book, The Porous Desert, was published this summer by FutureCycle Press, and testifies to his having internalised the desert during the past twenty-nine years. Some of his art work can be seen at http://www.davidchorlton.mysite.com/.

Here in the forever and ever sunny South,we still elect Republicans and afew Democrats. We still cook grits,chitlings, pigs’ feet, liver mush, anda few other things the rest of the worldnever ate. We also send our sons anddaughters to a war, which we have not forgot.

But what’s on our minds today is notwar or exotic food, or even the writers’strikes in NYC and Cal-E-fornia. Weare dry. We need rain. We pray for water.

Our lawns have dried up because wecan’t water them. Our trees are dyingbecause we have had no rain in months.(Forget our beautiful flowers and shrubs.)My neighbors’ wells are drying up, and theyhave little money to dig deeper, even if waterwere somewhere down there close to China.

When you say your prayers tonight, it’s OKto mention Iraq, especially all those moms andpops who have lost children there. It’s OK todream of a long and happy life with someoneyou love. Our best dreams are just dreams.

But before you say amen, ask for some rain.If we don’t get some soon, we’ll be movingTo where you live to drink your water.

Earl J. Wilcox founded The Robert Frost Review, which he edited for more than a decade. His poetry was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Friday, November 16, 2007

It was what she thought of first when she met her husband. Here's a man with balls. Here's a man fighting to protect their city. Look at those biceps. But he was more than brute strength. And they began a family. Then his firefighter brother was killed at the World Trade Center. Two of his former partners died. He became a detective. He was often late getting home nights. Taxis drove by trailing Cop Shot reward offers. He was more committed to his work than his children, and there would be grandchildren soon. She didn't want to play with them alone. She heard talk about random drug tests. Two or three times a week she cooked him meatballs. And she was a good cook.

Rochelle Ratner's latest poetry books include Leads (Otoliths Press, 2007), Balancing Acts(Marsh Hawk Press, 2006), Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, 2006) and House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003). She is the author of fifteen previous poetry collections and two novels (Bobby’s Girl and The Lion’s Share) both published by Coffee House Press). More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage.

Fats Domino sued for slanderThe case was dismissedIt was a rumpling moment

Tiresias declaredNo worry! We have the Jolly Green Giant!Armies of sprouts!

When the helicopters did arrive the Cyclops had eaten all the young sproutsAll 50 thousand!Tiresias disappeared(He had to)

The chorus of frogs cried outWe told you so!

The Chorus of old men gripedThis script will never work

Ten years of:Finger pointingVideo TapeBickering generalsNot one domino was found

A generation of new sprouts greened the fieldsTiresias returned to televisionResurrected by a PR firm stylish suits and watchesBlood sacrifice back in fashion again

His pet peacock fanned, preciously preened, pecked at cobs of rolled up paper

Tiresias saidAxis of evil!

The dominos responded by falling into place

He explainedI was at Troy,On the Dardanelles; it wasProtracted, but you knowNo one thanked me

Chorus of Frogs & Old menWe gotta get a new Prophet!

Christine Panascurates & often hosts "The Biscuit Readings Spoken Word Series" at Biscuit BBQ in Park Slope Brooklyn (the Brooklyn sibling of Cornelia Street Cafe). A former academic trained in the archaeology of Greece and Rome, she now pursues poetry and short fiction.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

I’m drawing the sun I drew as a child—thick yellow rays.A house that can’t stand up, wind beginning, smokeblown back in dark and fog. When I first moved

to married students’ housing, each Tuesday noona couple parked in front of our building, first in two cars,then in one. In the late afternoon they came back together

and left alone. They had to be lovers. So I believed,standing in the folds of gold curtains, watchingshadows begin and lengthen, the woman’s car, blue,

empty, all afternoon. I draw till my arm numbs.I could have died for love. But I didn’t.I draw coffee sour on the table. There’s a war

on television. It cancels the sky. There’s a train,a quiet station, a grain elevator. Names of the deadon a plaque in the park. The woods fill with lights

from my neighbors’ houses. I write your nameand then erase it. I draw the march into gunfire. Menwalking. The breasts of hills. Fingers red with blood.

Barbara Daniels' book, Rose Fever, will be published by WordTech Press in 2008. The Woman Who Tries to Believe, her chapbook, won the Quentin R. Howard Prize and was published by Wind Publications. Her poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, Natural Bridge, Tattoo Highway, and many other journals. Barbara Daniels received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Today is November seven, twothousand and eleven, the skyis a topaz blue, chill, thoughthe sun warms us into a drowse.

Public radio, KUNC, is playingjazz, no news until threewhile the dog's dreamingmemories behind my desk.I found a mouse, drownedin the sink this morning,Judge Mukasey has beenconfirmed by the JudiciaryCommittee. We're assured hewill be confirmed by a docileSenate, even though he refusedto say water boarding was torture.

Oil today at nearly one hundreddollars a barrel. Pakistan beatsprotesters in the streets. Coalfired plants in China are rainingsulfur dioxide on Japan and here.Our own are also distributingthe same on Utah, Arizona,Colorado, and New Mexico.

A neighbor died of cancertwo weeks ago. A former student,expelled from school twenty years agowas arrested for methamphetamine.Last month one hundred and sixty-sixnew jobs were created. The incomedisparity between poor and richis greatest here except for Hungary.And I wonder if love is really possiblein our tiny lives as ephemeral as daycompared to geologic time and galaxies,knowing we can control nothing at all.

Pat Maslowski lives in Drake, Colorado. She is a retired teacher and librarian.

Monday, November 12, 2007

In the ICD-9 book used for coding medical diagnoses, terrorism is code E979: Injuries resulting from the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof.

Aircraft used as a weaponaircraft burnedexplodedshot downcrushed by falling aircraftmunitions not otherwise specifiedburning building or structure:collapse offall fromhit by falling objectin jump fromconflagrationfire causing:asphyxiaburnsmelting of fittings and furnituresmoldering building or structurefragments from:

That’s what I did for months after—blessed the body parts.The beautiful body parts.

I imagined them moving—you know, the fingers.In my mind’s eyeI could see them, opening.

Cortney Davis is a nurse practitioner, author of three poetry collections, most recently Leopold's Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize and co-editor of two anthologies of poetry and prose by nurses from University of Iowa Press, Between the Heartbeats and Intensive Care. Her collection of essays about the art of nursing, Letters to a Young Nurse, is forthcoming from Kent State University Press.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

The man by the pond who seemed to besaluting the opposite shore was merelyshading his eyes against the glarebut it seemed the bare November treesstood at attention with him, inspectingthe afternoon sun as it passedin review. Seven ducks in precisionformation flew over to honorthe nameless dead. There are alwaysthe nameless dead where ever you are.Where ever you choose to stand can beyour reviewing stand. On the far shore,wave tops detached, ducks beating lowsplash in, a sudden patch of whitecaps.

Robert M. Chute (USAir Force, WW II) has a book from JustWrite Books, Reading Nature, of poetry based on scientific articles, that is available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Da De Los Meurtos, Marraskuu,in Finland and Japan, in Mexico and the Philippines,a common bulk of earth grabs attentionas it struts down the wide white corridortoward the light at the end and halts,unsure whether it should go on.

In Pueblo people crowd the streets,dance in cemeteries, surrounded byorange-yellow light from red candlesthat caress images of the Virgin Marystacked and piled on top of one another,sky blue robes and gold leaf,prayers in soft murmurs ghostingaround stones and marigolds.

Here is Maria Galeana and her three smallsons whose father has been dead 2 years,suffocated in the back of the box truckthat was to buy their independence,snorting on his own vomit as his lungsexploded fireworks and barbed wirethrough his brain.

Here is the 22 year old soldier’s funeral,a coffin draped with the flagand the gun salute of 11 rifles,who died protecting our glorious countryagainst the eternal they with theireternal burn.

We lay the dead on cartswhere we can push them from one endof our mind to the other: neat, compactrows of dead women and children,grandfathers, the sick and frail,all beyond our reach.We try, we tell ourselves, we try,but you just can’t help those whodon’t want to help themselves,how much can one person do?

Never do we see our own body wrackedlimp on the cart, dirt smudging the cheekof our wide-eyed daughter, dead beside usbut not before she was raped by the enemy,still clutching her small pink scrap of doll.

Never do we ask: for whom do we die?

In the eleventh hour of the eleventh day,who will be left to remember us,to leave cakes and money on our graves,we of precious life and freedom?

Michelle Morgan lives in Auburn, Maine, and will be attending the University of Southern Maine for her MA in American & New England Studies in the fall of 2007. Her poems and artwork have been published or are forthcoming in JMWW, The Banyan Review, Salt River Review, The Aurorean, Off the Coast, Wolf Moon Journal, Plain Spoke, and will be included in the forthcoming anthologies: Through the Kitchen Window: A Sense of Home and Outside Voices’ 2008 Anthology of Younger American Poets. She is Editor of the online lit/arts journal Panamowa: A New Lit Order.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Draping the flagover her shouldersshe said red is for bloodwhite for innocenceblue for the eyes of my Johnny-o

When Johnny comes marchingcomes flying comes stumblingcomes home lostbehind his eyes so blueso distant so furious so murderous

we'll give him a hearty welcome thenhoorah hoorah

Debra Kaufman is a poet and playwright. She is author of three poetry collections: Family of Strangers, Still Life Burning, and A Certain Light. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines and several anthologies.

They flash the dead on the screen,Faces shining like an autumn harvest,Their serious smiles, framed against stars, against stripes.

The parades this week are castWith those who returned, they step to the podium,This bruised harvest, their gait gingered.

One’s eye sockets are melted shut,Like the waxy remains of a holiday candle.

He hoarsely speaks of serving with pride,But his words are slurred, as are parts of his memory.

The next boy speaks too loudly, says he has no regrets,He accepts the injuries, a totem of honor,his left ear blown off by grenades,

He folds and refolds the yellow lined paper,Notes to himself on what must be said,

When his speech ends, he sees the clapping,But cannot hear the applause,or the few in the audience beginning to gasp.

Laurie Kuntz’s bio is as elusive as her estrogen levels. Sometimes she remembers she is a poet and sometimes not. During her five minutes in the sun Laurie has done the following: She is the winner of the 1999 Texas Review Chapbook Contest and her chapbook, Simple Gestures, is published by Texas review Press (2000). Blue Light Press published her chapbook,Women at the Onsen, in 2003. Edwin Mellen Press published her poetry collection, Somewhere in the Telling in 1999. She is the author of two English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) books, The New Arrival, BKS. 1 &2(Prentice-Hall, 1982, 1992). She was the editor of the University of Maryland's Asian Division's literary magazine, Blue Muse, and was a contributing editor to Hunger Mountain Magazine. Currently, she is a contributing editor for RockSaltPlum online literary magazine. In 2003, three of her poems were nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. More on her life and poetry can be seen on lauriekuntzpoetry.homestead.com. Pining for the tropics, she works and writes in Northern Japan.

Friday, November 09, 2007

It's two a.m. Do you know where your children are? Do you realize you're less than an hour's drive from New York City. Or did you plan it that way, so your kids could have the best of both worlds? The bars don't close until four. Do you know which ones they frequent? Have you raised them to be Democrats or Independents? Surely they can think for themselves. Surely they're old enough to vote, or they wouldn't be out this late. Please rest assured, as part of the state legislature, I'll always have their interests and safety uppermost in my mind. At all hours.

Rochelle Ratner's latest poetry books include Leads (Otoliths Press, 2007), Balancing Acts(Marsh Hawk Press, 2006), Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, 2006) and House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003). She is the author of fifteen previous poetry collections and two novels (Bobby’s Girl and The Lion’s Share) both published by Coffee House Press). More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

"Do you think we are animals—that you can just throw us onto the street?"

I imagine these words ringing through the city council meeting,Letting loose a shudderbefore disappearing into the transcripts.

"The city is tearing down the housing projects in New Orleansafter thousands of black people have been killed and displaced."

The councilmen will thank them for their comments.

The land has already been sold.

Sarah Lazare is a 24 year old union organizer living in San Francisco. She previously lived in Washington, DC, where she worked as a writer and researcher for a magazine that monitors and exposes corporate abuses. She grew up in Springfield, Illinois.

In November 2006, [Paul] Chan was invited to lecture at Tulane University. During his stay, he toured the flood-ravaged city. The stark landscape led him to think of New Orleans as the perfect setting for an outdoor version of Godot. "In the (Lower) 9th Ward and parts of Gentilly, you saw these barren streets," he said. "In Godot, the only setting is a road and a tree." But Chan, who lives in New York, said it was "not only a visual sensation that suggested (Samuel) Beckett's play, but the sense of waiting, waiting for Road Home money, or friends in Houston and Atlanta, waiting for them to return."

--"Artist Paul Chan brings his 'Godot' to a waiting city," by Doug MacCash and David Cuthbert, NOLA.com November 06, 2007

staged inhurricane

wasteland9th Ward

audiencemembers

say, "Waiting,I can tell you

about waiting."Waiting for rescue

waiting for FEMAfor Red Cross

for National Guardall deployed to Iraq

Waiting for housingwaiting for jobs

for new schoolsWaiting for Bush

Alan Catlin's latest chapbook is a long poem, "Thou Shalt Not Kill", an updating of Rexroth's seminal poem of the same name. Whereas Rexroth riffs on the abuses of the Eisenhower adminstration, the update observes abuses of power in the current administration with particular attention to the cynical, criminal behavior towards the Katrina hurricane victims. One year later, the victims are not forgotten. No matter how many candles the Bushes light, the appalling lack of humanity and the blatant hypocrisy of the folks in charge is as apparent as the disenfranchised, the homeless, and the poverty stricken people of the Gulf states.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

You could say “I’ve seen it all baby”and no one could dispute that.At 92, you’d lived to say “I have noregrets”-- even while rememberingthe blue flash of light, the mushroom cloudyou must have seen as beautiful and cleanwhen the plane you pilotedcircled the dark island one last time.

It was you, Mr. Tibbets who pushed the buttonand let drop the “Little Boy,”that made history for you and it,ended one kind of war and started another.And that the thing beneath you slipped outlike a baby, waiting to be born,overdue and eager to make contactwith life, made it somehow less regrettable.

Even in death, you’ll be murmuring,“I have no regrets,” in the belly of the planewhere they’ll drop your ashesover the great ocean to avoida burial site, a headstonethat would attract detractors who still assertthat any man who spreads death,no matter how and in what form,whether in the cockpit, under a heavy vestof munitions, or sitting behind a round table—cannot say, “I have no regrets.”

No, you didn’t invent destructionand you didn’t perfect it either.Before you partnered with the cold machinethat you gave your mother’s sweet-sounding name, “Enola Gay,”plenty of others before you let loosetheir furor and terror.They were never heroes though, nevergiven the power to thinktheir beautiful violencewould save somebody, savethis shattered worldfrom more shattering.

And many more came afterwho never lost a wink of sleepwhen their blankets of deathcovered a corner of the planet.Men like Pol Pot and Kissinger,Pinochet and Bin Laden.All of them resting easyin warm beds or some otherplace they might call heaven.

Mr. Tibbets, I bid you a hero’s farewelland say I’m sorrythat you didn’t get to knowhow much more human a man iswhen he lives to regretsome things.

Persis M. Karim lives in the Berkeley, CA with her husband and two sons. She teaches literature and creative writing at San Jose State University and is editor and contributing poet to Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006). She can be reached at http://www.persiskarim.com.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

This poem follows my summer trip to D.C., to do a hunger strike (following my successful three-week strike from home last fall) in the galleries of the House and Senate. I ended it because no water is allowed inside the Capitol Building (a glass an hour is required to maintain the body while not eating) and my body let me know it would not go through that again. But by then I was also convinced that there was no way the Democrats were going to take responsibility for this war on their own shoulders while that burden is now borne by the Republicans. I couldn't see a single soul on the floors of either house who would do anything they feared unwise politically. I've been a peace activist all my life, and am now resigning.

Leave me be, America,I cannot hopeto save youanymore.

Your bombs have burstmy eardrums, poppedmy nerves like junkies’ veins.They’re now as numb.

In my youth,I faced down bigots’shotguns foryour honor.

Whatever happenedto that honor, America?Did you trade itfor this power?

Leave me be, America,I cannot hopeto save youanymore.

Two wars ago,you gassed me on thesteps of your five-sidedhouse of terror.

Now your gasespoison soils and aireverywhere. What will you tellthe children who get ill?

Will you slap the handsthat reach to you for care?All our riches cannotmake them well?

Patricia Brooks was Fiction Editor of the Northwest Review during the three years she spent in the MFA program at the University of Oregon. She has published two novels,and had a play produced in Edward Albee's workshop at the Circle in the Square Theater in NYC. Her poetry has appeared in an assortment of journals, large and small.

Monday, November 05, 2007

My neighbor, the prison guard, aims a .22 Ruger at a crater onthet fat yellow moon thathangs low above a row of spooky hedge trees.He probably believes he can hit it from here.He’s very fond of his delusions, gets them wholesale from Fox TV News.

“My nephew borrowed a hundred bucks and never paid it back, so I took his gun! I don’t need another gun, but he needs the lesson!” When he pullsthe trigger nothing happens. The gun’s not loaded. “All you kidsneed to wake up to the real world.” (I’m three years younger than he is.)

I live in a gun happy state. We live in a gun happy country. My neighbor feels comfortable with a house full of guns, and I found my Halloween costume: a woundedmoon leaking her luminous guts into a vast bowl of gunpowder.

Ex-firefighter, ex-beat cop, ex-dirt farmer/cowhand/bouncer and current garden center flunky; Frank Sloan lives and writes in a small shack near the heart of the American empire. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he believes it’s a heart that merits salvation.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

A red boil risesin the eastern sky to showa film of ash on asphalt:your wedding photosyour tax returns, the couchyou could not get rid of.

Like a timid snowfallthe flakes sift down:your closets full of clothesfor each of your changing sizes;a decade of newspapers storedin neat columns in your sparegarage; a marriage fullof Christmas ornaments.

When the wind is rightThe sky shows its shy blue faceuntil the smoke returnsbringing with it your law books,your socks, your brand newking size bed.

Flames glitter on the hillside:This is something big,they tell us, We are strongerthan you will ever be.

And they bring us their booty:all those ancient phone booksthe magazines you had no timeto read, the bible you heldat confirmation, your maskand snorkel, your carefullandscaping, and plastic,all that plastic.

Tamara Madison teaches French in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is a long-time participant in Donna Hilbert's poetry workshop in Long Beach, California. Her chapbook The Belly Remembers won the Jane Buel Bradley Chapbook Award in 2005 and is available through pearlmag.com.

Once upon a time, betweenLove affairs,On an island called Alameda,He sat drinking green tea.

Real ducks, not rubber ones,Swam in the pool,And the morning soundsWere vibrantAnd interrupted only by the roarsFrom jet planes taking off from OaklandInternational.They used to take off aboveIndustrial Hayward to the south.

The mighty scream and quake from the GE Jet P.Engines were the soundsOf filth, systematically appliedLayer upon layer upon layer,Upon our community, without rest.

Al Simmons was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 21, 1948. He studied with Ed Dorn at Northeastern Illinois University. He was faculty assistant and student aide to Ted Berrigan, who replaced Ed Dorn at Northeastern Illinois University. In the early 70s he was part of the Stone Wind Poets who began the first regular poetry reading series in Chicago since Sherwood Anderson. He won several Illinois Arts Council Awards as Editor for Stone Wind Magazine. He served as Artist-In-Residence City of Chicago Council on Fine Arts, 1979-80, he is recognized as the founder of The Spoken Word Movement, Commissioner of the WPA/WPBA, World Poetry Association, and the World Poetry Bout Association, creator of the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Fights, Co-Producer of the Taos Poetry Circus from 1981-2000. His column, "Coasting," appeared in Strong Coffee Magazine, Chicago, from 1994-1997. During that time he was also a regular contributor to The Temple and Exquisite Corpse. He has two books, King Blue and Care Free. He currently lives in Alameda, California.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Adults in AustraliaAre filling up the listsOf artful orthodontistsTo look a certain way

Aussie realtor, twenty-somethingKimmie B.Says: In my profession it makes all the difference in theWorld to look a certain wayWhich way is that?Wonders the Iraqi girl who hears Kimmie B. quoted on the BBC

Which way, the girl in Baghdad wonders as she lies on her bedroom floorand opens a map of the worldWhich way, the girl in Baghdad wonders, imagining Kimmie B. halfway around the worldImagining Kimmie B. praying toDiamonds on the map, east west north south, all the rough paper stones she's heard about, this girlin dreams that gag her in the dark of night, one two three thousand times

What, the girl wonderskneeling on the worlddid Kimmie B. mean when she said:I need a celebrity mouth

The Iraqi girl was told by her mother just yesterday not to look left or right, not up or down, but only straight aheadLet your nose guide you, Mama saidThere are dead bodies everywhereOn the streets of the girl’s neighborhoodThere is nothing you can doIf the men come to pick them up, good, if not

The girl looks at the mapThe girl sees California and thinks about looking a certain wayfrom Australia to California and all around the sun splashed worldThere is a poster of Disney World on her wallThere is a poster of Arnold Schwartzenegger as The TerminatorIf the men come to pick up the bodies, we are very, very happyIf not, there’s nothing to say, nothing to doIf not, then you just have to look a certain wayAnd go on

Steve Hellyard Swartz is an award-winning filmmaker, broadcaster, and poet. This year, he won an Honorable Mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. His poetry has been published in The Kennesaw Review, levelpoetry.com, switched-on guttenberg, and Haggard and Halloo.

Friday, November 02, 2007

My father always had veto power over his wife and four daughtersand, backing him up, like when I ran away, underage, to be with my boyfriend,the police, the handcuffs, the cop car to search me out and bring me home,where my mother had taken to her bed in disgrace,

big,Tudor style house on the corner, shaken to its laundress-inhabited cellar.My mother never once spoke back to my father.Mostly, she’d turn a blank face to his constant sniping,but once, when he threw a fork at her across the table

because she didn’t serve the dishes in the right order or at the right pace,or didn’t put a separate set of salt and pepper shakers by his plateso he, stutterer, halted by s’s, wouldn’t have to keep asking pass the salt,she ran upstairs to the third floor, as far away as she could get,

her daughters crowding in behind her, quivering, and called her mother.I’m putting my money on Nancy Pelosi, her courage to talk backto the men, the despots, my father all over again, on her unsmudgedwet lipstick, her wide mouth, such shiny white teeth,

flat, pink, clean tongue, on the cut of her silk blouses in every color,under a soft jacket, over a skirt, her legs still beautiful. On the pearls.I’ve never seen a woman of seventy, attractive, sexual,look with such confidence in the eyes of a man in power and claim her opposition,

you are wrong, your policies are blunders,in slow, clear sentences. True, she’s had a hard time.After months at the gavel, her eyes are set deeper,her neck is thinner, strands of her coiffed, dyed hair fall out of place.

When the Senate whip, her ally, stands too close beside her in front of the mike,puts his arm around her back, his fingers coming up over her other shoulder,she keeps her trained face poised for the camera,but her eyes flicker, to all of us, her disdain.

Not like my downtrodden mother,rough-skinned, plump, penniless without my father,in that secure hold at the corner of Bryant and King,never standing up for herself or her four skinny, fidgety daughters.

Sondra Zeidenstein's poems have been published in magazines, journals and anthologies, and in a chapbook collection entitled Late Afternoon Woman.A Detail in that Story is her first book, Resistance is her second. She is editor of several anthologies including A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence and Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children, and publisher of Chicory Blue Press, a small literary press, now twenty years old, that focuses on writing by older women.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

We Card Everyone, the sign at the register says. It’s what they teach employees. And high school girls with pimply faces working for minimum wage are proud to have learned it.

At the back of the market, two Marines home on leave from Iraq are trying to get together a poker game. The father of one has a deck of cards, government issue, with all the names and faces of the terrorists sought right after 9/11. The names are unfamiliar. The bearded faces all look the same to them. The cards were bought on eBay.

They’re told there will be new cards soon. Cards meant to teach the soldiers about historic sites and artifacts. Diamonds for artifacts and treasures, spades for archaeological digs. Whispering, of course, steal this, or take this home with you. Something besides their wounds to show the family. If the family can bear to look at them.

A 77-year-old man, who vaguely remembers one boy as a child, eavesdrops as he steps around them to fill his cart with six packs of Coors and Miller Light, refreshments for the book club at the senior center. They say he looks young for his age. He keeps his weight down. He’s been shopping at this market for over 40 years. When the cashier asks for proof of age it all becomes too much for him.

Rochelle Ratner's latest poetry books include Leads (Otoliths Press, 2007), Balancing Acts(Marsh Hawk Press, 2006), Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, 2006) and House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003). She is the author of fifteen previous poetry collections and two novels (Bobby’s Girl and The Lion’s Share) both published by Coffee House Press). More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage.

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